It is very sad, but not entirely surprising that Barbaro’s life was brought to an end this week after an 8-month struggle following his disastrous injury out of the starting gate at the Preakness.

Eclipse Press, part of Blood-Horse Publications of Lexington, KY, was all set optimistically to publish Barbaro: The Horse Who Captured America’s Heart, by Sean Clancy, a hardcover, in landscape format, with 100 color photos. Review copies of the April publication were recently delivered — and then Barbaro’s life ended. Eclipse will issue the book, still as close to the original  pub date as possible, with a revised final chapter.

Of course Barbaro was the exception in thoroughbred horseracing, and another book, also due in April, will remind readers what most of the sport is like. Not By A Long Shot: A Season at a Hard Luck Horse Track, by veteran racing reporter T.D. Thornton (PublicAffairs) shows readers the more prevalent conditions that exist around this “sport of kings,” with aging horses competing on aging tracks, where young jockeys hope to beat the odds and make it into the big time, where a lot of local men and women — from rural to Runyonesque, and not with the coffers of kings — enjoy the spectacle and are the main support of a multi-billion-dollar betting industry.

Many of us have been to a local racetrack, where ”racing lives [are] lived below the radar,” as the Not By A Long Shot galley sheet puts it. I once bet on a 9-year-old mare named Fast Emily in a race at the Great Barrington, MA fairgrounds. We didn’t win. Thornton reminds us that even the best of the horses lose 75% of the time.

Readers may enjoy a celebratory book about Barbaro, with his 6 races, and the millions earned and spent trying to save him (a rescue motivated at least in part so that millions in stud fees could have been earned — thoroughbreds are only allowed to reproduce by “live cover” ). But Thornton’s book will make sure that they understand Barbaro in context.  

Look for reviews in forthcoming issues of LJ.

In our latest, we’ve got reviews of cutting edge future fic, a time-traveling hipster romance, diet and nutritional advice, a biography of Winston Churchill’s “dark lady” (his mother), an examination of our “darker selves,” an account of mafia and cop shenanigans, the speeches and writings of Pope Benedict XVI, a “sensual cookbook,” and a history of beer and food.

Xpress Reviews for Week of Jan. 30th, 2007

FICTION
Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge. Pyr: Prometheus.

Mancusi, Marianne. A Hoboken Hipster in Sherwood Forest. Love Spell: Dorchester.

NONFICTION
Haas, Elson M., M.D., with Buck Levin. Staying Healthy with Nutrition: The Complete Guide to Diet and Nutritional Medicine. 21st century ed. Celestial Arts.

Higham, Charles. Dark Lady: Winston Churchill’s Mother and Her World. Carroll & Graf.

Hollis, James. Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA).

Lawson, Guy & William Oldham. The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia. Scribner.

Pope Benedict XVI. The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches. HarperSanFrancisco: HarperCollins.

Reiley, Amy (text) & Kersti Frigell (illus.). Fork Me, Spoon Me: The Sensual Cookbook. Life of Reiley.

Skilnik, Bob. Beer & Food: An American History. Jefferson, dist. by Independent Pubs. Group.

It’s been a year since the James Frey train wreck drove book pusher extraordinare Oprah to tears. Last Friday, however, she was all smiles when she revived her book club with Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Biography (HarperSanFrancisco, 2000). Oprah described the book as being about “what makes character, what makes you who you are”—and while our reviewer (the very well-read celeb hound Rosellen Brewer) might agree, she seemed underwhelmed by the actor’s meditations on his past and pat ending: “We’re all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual unending struggle against those imperfections.” She also points out that Poitier pads a good deal of Man with material from his first memoir, This Life (1980). Only his takes on acting elicited Brewer’s enthusiasm.

In any case, Oprah’s word is gospel, and not even a week after her announcement, Man is on top of the Amazon chart. We in the Bookroom will be charting its course on LJ’s Best Sellers List.

Back when I was just a casual book buyer and not the galley-juggling superclown of today, I thought of Da Capo Books as that cool rock’n'roll reissue press. Everything I ever needed to know about the precursors to pop music icons of my lifetime (e.g., Elvis, the Beatles, the Clash, Madonna) could be found in the pages of seminal texts like Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City, Giles Oakley’s The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues, and Nick Tosches’s Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n'Roll. Like a good little student of the devil’s music, I vowed to devour those books and more whole.

I didn’t—still haven’t (except for Gillett’s book). College homework and music nerd boyfriends got in the way, but I’m still enamored of Da Capo and as the music book editor, I have the great pleasure of assigning its books. I know what Senior Director of Publicity Lissa Warren is thinking: “Actually, Heather, after being purchased by the Perseus Books Group in 1999, Da Capo expanded eons beyond music—it now does health, self-help, and even parenting.”

This is true. But as the editor also responsible for those three areas, I still say music makes up the heart of Da Capo. YAs, don’t come looking for photo-heavy, cut-and-paste biographies of the latest post-emo, pretty boy outfits from New Jersey. Da Capo tackles quality, often out-of-the-way music figures (e.g., Dave Van Ronk) without being holier-than-thou. And when it comes to the nearly dead white males of rock’n'roll, as well as the newer icons, the books don’t take the usual approach.

My reviewers would back me up. James Perone, for one, has sung the praises of the 2006 entry in Da Capo’s ”Best Music Writing” series and singled out Everett True’s gritty forthcoming biography of Nirvana (see LJ 3/1/07). His December 2006 review of The Show I’ll Never Forget, edited by SPIN writer Sean Manning, inspired me to take home an extra galley two Fridays ago, and unlike most anthologies, it completely engrosses despite, or maybe because of, the disparate voices and performers included. So no one waxes ecstatic about the Clash at the Palladium. I’ll live. I got to read Linda Yablonsky’s plaintive portrait of Nina Simone (and her late father) at the Village Gate. 

For the past month the top news story dominating book industry email newsletters like PWDaily, Publishers Lunch, and Shelf Awareness has been the December 29 bankruptcy filing of San Diego book wholesaler Advance Marketing Systems (AMS), parent company of Publishers Group West (PGW). Unless you’re an acquisitions librarian, you are probably a bit like me and pay little attention to the intricacies of book distribution. (I don’t care how the book gets there as long as it is in my favorite bookstore, library, grocery store, airport bookstore, and my local Costco’s when I want it.) The main things I knew about PGW is that it distributed some interesting and unique small presses (Seal Press, McSweeney’s Books, Berrett-Koehler) and threw the hippest, coolest parties at BookExpo—Indie rocker Michelle Shocked was the star attraction at the first PGW party I attended.

But a Jan. 27 San Franciso Chronicle report, “A Financial Thriller in the Publishing World” offers an excellent, clear-eyed overview of the financial crisis that threatens the existence of 130 independent publishers. At stake are the three months of sales revenues prior to Christmas (the most profitable time of the year for many publishers) collected by PGW for its clients. The bankruptcy filing suspended all payments by AMS and its subsidiaries, including PGW. Thus the $600,000 in profits (much from the sale of Dave Eggers’s new novel What is the What) McSweeney’s had expected to receive has been frozen, and the publisher is unable to make its planned donations of the novel’s profits to a charity helping Sudanese refugees. Although an offer by Perseus Books Group to pay the publishers 70 cents for every dollar owed them by PGS in exchange for a four-year distribution contract looks promising, the article concludes that “for better or worse, the bankruptcy may have ended an era in independent book distribution.”  For an insider’s look at the AMS bankruptcy, check out Radio Free PGW , a blog started by affected PGW publishers.

Paging all heat-seeking singles and couples: LJ’s February 1 issue is bursting at the seams with our annual pre–Valentine’s Day roundup, “Hot and Heavy Harmony,” among other tantalizing Book Review specials. This double-paged spread boasts a few how-tos (e.g., Joel D. Block’s The Art of the Quickie) as well as more cerebral, even meditative material (e.g., Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage). LJ’s sex book reviewer supreme, Martha Cornog, returns with the assistance of former LJ intern Amanda Glasbrenner and Book Review Assistant Anna Katterjohn.

Of course, I couldn’t assign everything sex- and love-themed that publishes in February. There were some earlier pubs and late arrivals that looked like contenders. So if the roundup isn’t big and bad enough for your patrons, here is a brief addendum:

• William Cane’s Kiss Like a Star: Smooching Secrets from the Silver Screen (Griffin: ISBN 0-312-35993-4) is a charming, though not an explicitly demonstrative, sequel to the best-selling The Art of Kissing (Martha reviewed the 2nd edition). Stills from classic and modern flicks illustrate “The Almost Kiss” (La Dolce Vita) and “Kissing in the Snow” (Bridget Jones’ Diary). Both romantics and movie buffs will go for this.
• In Naked on the Page (Viking), Jane Ganahl recounts a year in her middle-aged dating life. Her columns from the San Francisco Chronicle were a big hit locally and could very well be nationally—Ganahl is funny-cynical and a single mother of a twentysomething. Plenty of other women can relate. (For more on sex and women of a certain age, see “The Go-Go Golden Libido,” the 2006 roundup.)
• Single Mom Seeking (Seal Press) is also a collection of columns (from www.literarymama.com), though Rachel Sarah is 28 with a nine-month-old living in New York City when the book opens. Sarah, too, got tremendous reader response, and her book will no doubt strike a chord with other young single moms in big cities.
• And finally, some steamy how-to from the house of steamy how-to, Quiver. The full-color erotic photos in Susan Crain Bakos’s The Sex Bible don’t make it the most library-friendly book depending on the population served, but it deserves consideration for its informed, in-depth, tartly written text. Bakos is an expert on the female orgasm, and she clearly knows a lot about everything else, from flirting to stripping.

In the midst of editing Jo Ann Vicarel’s  March 1 mystery column yesterday (we always work two months in advance of an issue date), one review of a promising new series intrigued me. The book under question was Deadman’s Switch featuring a fresh new sleuth, crisis manager Charlotte Lyon who must make her client Sun Rail look as caring as possible after a fatal derailment. Sadly its author, Barbara Seranella, creator of the gritty Munch Mancini series (No Man Standing), died on Saturday Jan. 21 while awaiting a liver transplant.  A few weeks before her death, Seranella had written a poignant Los Angeles Times editorial about her long battle with illness, and mystery author Denise Hamilton offers a moving tribute. In her memory, as one Dorothy-L listserver suggested, buy her books and be sure to fill out the organ-donor slot on your driver’s license. 

In my December blog You: On a Diet Now, I previewed the 2007 edition of LJ’s annual diet and fitness roundup, and I’m back to flog it now that it’s live on the web. “‘Tis the Season To Move Your Body” is the perfect accompaniment to all those gym membership drives going on right now (according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportclub Association, January remains the most popular time to join up, followed by February). This year’s starred titles impressed me with their spin. Tricia Cunningham and Heidi Skolnik’s The Reverse Diet argues for eating dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner, while Steven Gurgevich and Joy Gurgevich’s The Self-Hypnosis Diet stresses meditation to keep a strong body-mind connection. I don’t fancy myself a fitness guru, but I do promise librarians this: order a healthy portion of these books, and watch your circulation go through the ceiling. 

I assign political science titles for review in LJ. For the past many months, this classification has overflowed with books relating to the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror,” but another kind of book is coming in quite often now: the presidential candidate’s biography or autobiography. 

Bill Richardson was ahead of the game. He only just declared that he is exploring a 2008 run, but he put his autobiography, Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life, out in 11/05. I hope it doesn’t set the standard for all of these books. Our reviewer called  it “revealing — to a fault,” e.g., Richardson writes of loading up his Alfa Romeo to move to New Mexico in 1978. This tugged at how many readers’ heartstrings as they remembered their own trials with getting luggage into their Italian sports car?

John Edwards took a different approach in 11/06 and put his name, as editor, behind Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, celebrating the value that each of us places upon the homes in which we grew up. The nostalgia (literally) was enough to give me neuralgia, but many have understandably, if predictably, admired the collection of memories and photographs from a spectrum of famous and ordinary individuals. Memories of souped-up tranportation were of living room Lionel train sets rather than Alfa Romeos.

To balance his coffee-table entry with wonkier stuff, Edwards is one of three editors of a volume due out in May from the New Press, Ending Poverty in America: How To Restore the American Dream. Will he gain readers? Will they turn into voters? If so, will they vote for him?

Is Nader planning another run? His most recent book publishes in a couple of weeks: The Seventeen Traditions, from HarperCollins. This is billed as Nader’s most personal book because he professes the importance of parents in raising children “of virtue and talent” (he quotes Jefferson on that). Is he trying to win some “family values” types who need to replace their worn-out volumes of Bill Bennett? Should libraries adjust their collections accordingly?

John McCain took a cue from Bill Bennett with his Character is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember, written with Mark Salter. Later this year, the two will  be bringing out Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, which may not seek to include the younger readership of the previous title because he too is now honing in on votership. 

As for McLain, there have already been a few biographies of Hillary Clinton. Most of the McLain studies are sympathetic to him, while perhaps one of the few balanced studies of Clinton is  Gil Troy’s Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, worth keeping in mind as the campaigns heat up.

Barack Obama published his second autobiography The Audacity of Hope, last October, following his Dreams from My Father. Now Black Dog & Leventhal is promoting the “first biographical portrait ever” of Obama, by People magazine’s Steve Dougherty. They distinguish it from Obama’s own books by titling it Hopes and Dreams. It’s due in about a month.

Last year at ALA in Chicago, both Mayor Daley and Senator Obama spoke to the convention. It was a fascinating juxtaposition: Mayor Daley was fire and brimstone, punching his fist into his hand, speaking with astonishing passion and flare. Obama was the relaxed and conversational communicator. There seemed no question that Mayor Daley’s speech was written specifically for America’s librarians, and that made his speech have a certain magic to us. He boasted, deservedly, of all the work he has done on behalf of Chicago’s public libraries, and he spoke of the values of reading in highly personal and meaningful ways. Senator Obama’s speech was the generic one that ALA members often hear from the visiting politician, all about how he loved libraries as a kid, how much it mattered to go there. As a librarian, maybe I was disappointed, but as a voter, my own hopes and dreams are newly alive.  

We’ve all at one point or another wished for a new brain because our old one seems a bit sluggish or downright petty. The real, open-minded you, for instance, doesn’t want to be judgemental about the children of famous authors who also become authors. “Can Rebecca Walker really write?” you wonder while editing the review of her upcoming Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (Riverhead, March). “Or did she land a contract based on the fact that her mom’s Alice Walker?”

Cue neuroplasticity (”the idea that the adult brain is capable of positive change,” to quote my reviewer Mary Ann Hughes), a hot topic in the Bookroom right now. Although it seems to apply to stroke sufferers and people grappling with moderate to severe mental disorders, I couldn’t help but imagine neuroplasticity as a more routine medicine for semi-burned-out corporate cogs like myself. In my ninth year in publishing, I admit I can be overly cynical and want to get better.

Luckily, two books on the topic are coming out in March: Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking) and Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential To Transform Ourselves (Ballantine).

Whether they’ll help me is unclear; what is clear, is that I’m still thinking about celebrity and publishing. Methinks another blog is forming…